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How Fresh Blood Will Invigorate Game of Thrones

With any luck, Bran Stark (played by Isaac Hempstead-Wright, at left) won't have to do all the dreaming on Game of Thrones next season.

HELEN SLOAN

The large number of new characters reportedly coming to Game of Thrones next season – some of whom I'd given up hope of ever seeing on the show – should give fans hope that the television series will hew more closely to its vaunted source material.

Aside from the occasional pointless nude scene and some obvious struggles to tell such a sweeping story on a limited budget, the terrific first season leaned quite heavily on the first novel in George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. But the HBO series sort of lost its way in Season 2. An adaptation of the second book, A Clash of Kings, the sophomore season came in chock-full of changes to the story, almost all of them bad.

Of particular concern were a silly subplot in which sulky bastard Jon Snow takes the wildling girl Ygritte prisoner, a tedious and nonsensical romance between the young king Robb Stark and an exotic beauty/field medic named Talisa, and a lively but credulity-straining love-hate relationship between fugitive runaway Arya Stark and steely paterfamilias Tywin Lannister. Other big changes in Season 2 included virtually everything that happened to Daenerys Targaryen, a character weighted down by a great deal of contrived intrigue and empty histrionics.

Making so many changes also required the writers to invent a lot of new dialog – unlike the first season, where most of the lines were drawn directly from the books, which are perhaps the most accomplished work of fantasy literature of the past few decades. This led to a lot of wobbly characterization (notably with nasty queen Cersei Lannister), as well as characters thinking and acting more like contemporary Americans than inhabitants of a medieval world (most notably in the Jon/Ygritte and Robb/Talisa scenes).

>Creating great epic fantasy is really hard.

All this goes to show that creating great epic fantasy is really hard. What Martin had going for him when writing A Clash of Kings was a lifelong passion for medieval history and a decade or so spent living and breathing these characters. You can't fake that. If Season 2 of Game of Thrones demonstrated anything, it's that the show should stick as closely as possible to the source material, since every time the show deviates, the illusion that these characters and places are real begins to unravel.

Fortunately, last week's episode, "Blackwater," was written by Martin himself, and was probably the best installment of Game of Throne yet, featuring the show's first big on-screen battle. It certainly gave fans a boost as the season draws to a close this Sunday, but the question remains: Will Season 3 follow in the footsteps of the first season or the second?

(Spoiler alert: Character info and details from the books follows.)

Game of Thrones

Most Intriguing New Characters
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Based on the Season 3 casting revelations from Entertainment Weekly, the two characters I'm most excited about are Jojen Reed and his sister Meera. According to the events in the books, these two should have shown up at Winterfell midway through Season 2. When they didn't, I started to get a little nervous.

They're the children of Howland Reed, lord of Greywater Watch, a castle that drifts about the swampy lands of the crannogmen. Howland was a close friend and ally of Bran's father, Eddard Stark, and is the only person who's known to have witnessed what happened at the Tower of Joy during Robert's Rebellion. (From flashbacks in A Game of Thrones, we know that Ned and Howland slew three knights of King Aerys' kingsguard in an attempt to rescue Ned's sister Lyanna, but that she died in Ned's arms.) The Reed children know more about Bran's father than he does, and are able to fill him in on some key events that happened long ago.

They're interesting, likeable characters. Meera is brave and resourceful, skilled with a net and trident, and Jojen is calm and wise. He has moss-colored eyes and dreams "green dreams" that always come true: In A Clash of Kings, it's Jojen, not Bran, who dreams about the sea coming to Winterfell. I'm really not crazy about how the show's writers gave that dream to Bran, because it makes Jojen feel a bit superfluous. Now I can just picture Bran being all like, "You have dreams that foretell the future? Oh yeah, me too. But do you also have telepathic wolf dreams? No? Well, sucks to be you."

Another character I'm excited to see is Ser Brynden Tully. He's the brother of Catelyn Stark's father, Hoster Tully, who's slowly dying. Brynden has always been the black sheep of the family, and as the sigil of House Tully is a leaping trout, he's taken to calling himself "the Blackfish." Being somewhat at odds with his brother, he departed the Tully's ancestral fortress of Riverrun and took service with Catelyn's sister, the Lady Lysa Arryn. We first meet him in A Game of Thrones, when he joins Catelyn's party at the Bloody Gate and escorts them through the Vale to the Eyrie.

In the show we never see him at the Eyrie, and you'd think that Catelyn would consult with him if he were there, so maybe he's been up to something else in the continuity of the show. Brynden is a likeable mix of gentle good humor and pragmatic toughness, and will be a welcome addition to the cast. There's been much speculation among fans about his sexual orientation, based on a passing reference to Catelyn telling her father that "Brynden will never marry," though that could just as easily mean that he's too independent and solitary to ever settle down. The TV version may very well clear that up for us, though, since the show has been anything but subtle when it comes to dealing with the sexuality of the characters.

And speaking of the Tullys, another character to join the cast is Catelyn's younger brother Edmure, heir to Riverrun. He's sort of a hapless schlub whom the more-driven Catelyn is always despairing of. Edmure's heart is in the right place, but he's really not good for much – his most notable accomplishment in A Clash of Kings is disrupting Jaime Lannister's escape from Riverrun via a fortuitously timed return trip from a brothel.

>Earlier this year, I noted that Dragonstone was feeling a bit underpopulated.

Earlier this year, I noted that Dragonstone was feeling a bit underpopulated. Melisandre mentioned Selyse Florent, Stannis' wife, but she was never seen. She's a shrill, unattractive woman who's become a fanatical follower of R'hllor, the Red God of the east. It's also been announced that Stannis' daughter Shireen has been cast. I was sure she'd been written out of the show, since in "The Night Lands," Melisandre tells Stannis that his wife has given him "nothing, no sons, only stillborns, only death."

Anyway, Shireen is a young girl who as a baby was afflicted with greyscale, a disease that's left a section of her face stiff and unsightly. It'll be interesting to see if they keep that in the show; facial disfigurement seems to be one thing the TV version often dispenses with. The fact that Shireen has been cast raises hopes that we'll also see her jester, Patchface, a man left simple-minded by an accident at sea in which he nearly drowned – or possibly did drown. Patchface, one of the more intriguing enigmas in the books, is forever singing faintly disconcerting nonsense songs about life beneath the waves, and some of his verses seem to be prophetic.

Other additions to the cast of characters are Beric Dondarrion and his companion Thoros of Myr. We actually saw Beric briefly in Season 1 – Ned Stark sent him off to hunt down Gregor Clegane, who was suspected of raiding villages in the Riverlands. I'm not sure if the same actor will return, but the fact that this is being reported as "casting news" suggests maybe not. (Gregor Clegane is also now played by a different actor than in Season 1.) Beric, known as the Lightning Lord due to the thunderbolt on his sigil, found himself on the wrong side of the law when Ned was executed and Prince Joffrey seized the throne. He now leads an outlaw band called the Brotherhood Without Banners, which was mentioned briefly in Season 2 at Tywin's council. Beric is a figure cloaked in rumor – numerous reports claim he's been killed, but he inevitably returns to harass the Lannisters and their allies.

One of his most trusted aides is the red priest Thoros, who worships the same foreign god as Melisandre. Thoros was known in King's Landing as a fun-loving party boy, fond of spooking his opponents' horses with his flaming sword. His religion speaks of the rebirth of the legendary hero Azor Ahai, who will wield the flaming sword Lightbringer. Thoros has no magic sword, though. He simply douses ordinary blades in wildfire and sets them alight – a good trick, but one that ruins the steel. These are two fantastic characters. Can't wait to see them.

Another fantastic character is Olenna Redwyne, called The Queen of Thorns, a frail, diminutive woman who's outspoken and acerbic. She's also exceedingly ruthless, and willing to do whatever it takes to advance the interests of her family. (She's the mother of Mace Tyrell, lord of Highgarden, who in turn is the father of Margaery and Loras.) Olenna doesn't have many scenes in the novels, but her appearances are always unforgettable, particularly one involving the ballad, "The Bear and the Maiden Fair."

The More Book Characters, the Better
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One character I'm not looking forward to as much is Daario Naharis, a bold sellsword captain who catches the eye of Daenerys Targaryen. What is it about Daario that makes him so irresistable? His blue hair? His gold tooth? His twin daggers? I'm sure I don't know, and that's certainly not because Dany spends too little time mulling it over. While I'm a little curious to see how closely he'll conform to his description in the books (I suspect not very), that's about as far as my interest in him goes. Still, the more characters from the books the better, as far as I'm concerned.

The last two characters on the list are Mance Rayder and Tormund Giantsbane, two wildlings who live north of the Wall. Mance is king of the wildlings – at least to the extent that the free-spirited, cantankerous wildlings have a king. He was once a member of the Night's Watch (a "crow," as the wildlings put it), but deserted and joined the wildlings so he could live according to his own rules. Tormund is one of his chief lieutenants, a big, blustery man who's always telling tall tales, such as the one about the time that a shape-shifting bear-woman bit off half his penis. Fortunately, it was so long to start with that he's still much better endowed than most men. (I wonder if that was taken into account during casting.)

Mance and Tormund are both likeable, Mance in his quiet way and Tormund in his brash one. They are among the characters that embody the appealing side of wildling society, in contrast to Rattleshirt, who demonstrates the harsher aspects of life without laws. These two will be welcome additions to the cast.

Season 2 of Game of Thrones plainly suffered from the absence of so many key characters, in particular the Reeds.Season 2 plainly suffered from the absence of so many key characters, in particular the Reeds. I had assumed these characters had been cut strictly for budgetary reasons, but showrunner David Benioff tells Entertainment Weekly that the producers were trying to be "parsimonious" about introducing new characters, so as not to overwhelm viewers who haven't read the books.

If that's true, I think it's a misjudgment. The whole appeal of A Song of Ice and Fire is that it's an epic story with a cast of thousands. The first three books alone contain more than a thousand named characters, and that certainly doesn't seem to have hurt the novels' popularity. Also, characters like Jojen and Meera are so distinctive and memorable that it's hard for me to imagine that introducing them in Season 2 would have flummoxed viewers. Instead, holding them back has probably created confusion – by making Bran into someone who has green dreams, for example.

The choices of new characters suggest that Season 3 will be emphasizing courtly intrigue and the conflicts between the great houses of Westeros. The powerful Tully family has been mostly absent from the show so far, which resulted in some odd logic and a certain smallness of scale in some of the scenes featuring Catelyn, Robb and Jaime, but with Brynden and Edmure both joining the cast, it seems that will no longer be the case. And the addition of Olenna can only mean that the show intends to preserve the machinations of the ambitious Tyrell family, which is all to the good. I had worried somewhat that the show was making Margaery into a more overt schemer than she is in the books because they were planning not to include any additional Tyrells.

I anticipate a few hiccups as these characters are introduced in ways that never happened in the books, but now that the cast seems to be growing to cover most of the important bases, I'm hopeful that Season 3 (and Season 4) will follow A Storm of Swords, Martin's third book in the series, more closely.

It's an exciting prospect, as the third novel is arguably the high point of the series, full of riveting set pieces and gut-wrenching plot twists that will make for entertaining television, if the show's producers mine Martin's rich fantasy world for all it's worth.

Blowback: What's Your Take on Game of Thrones?
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Have you enjoyed Season 2 of Game of Thrones? And what do you think about the fresh blood coming in Season 3? Share your favorite bits, your heartfelt complaints and your biggest hopes and fears below.